Gas Prices Rise on Refineries’ Record Failures - New York Times
Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer’s records.
These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an “invisible hurricane,” have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country’s 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analysts.
There have been blazes at refineries in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and California, some of them caused by lightning strikes. Plants have suffered power losses that disrupted operations; a midsize refinery in Kansas was flooded by torrential rains last month.
American refiners are running roughly 5 percent below their normal levels at this time of the year.
“You have a system that is taxed to the limit,” said Adam Robinson, an energy research analyst at Lehman Brothers. “This is what happens when spare capacity is eroded.”
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted the nation’s energy lifeline two years ago, oil companies delayed maintenance on many of their plants to make up for lost supplies and take advantage of the high prices. But, analysts say, they are now paying a price for deferring repairs.
Or, instead of blaming the oil companies for not making repairs, you might ask yourself when was the last time the fevered array of goo-goos, NIMBYs, nannies, Greens, Global Warmers, peak oil hysterics, and general leftwing energy obstructionists permitted a new refinery to be built in the United States.
Try 31 years ago, in 1976.
This is why folks capable of rational thought despise the obstructionist types I list above as hopelessly irrational. These morons thought they could simply wave their magic “no” wands, and somehow, energy would seamlessly spring up from somewhere else.
Guess what? It doesn’t quite work that way.
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OTOH, with light sweet crude supplies drying up in the US and elsewhere, why not have refineries for heavy sour (sulfur laden) crude overseas polluting other peoples air and water?
As long as we’re importing the oil anyway, why not go ahead and import the finished product? It’s a global economy.
Sure, it’s a global economy, rick, but that doesn’t mean it is either necessary nor wise to entirely outsource the control of certain items necessary to our national security - and I would include energy on that list.
I’ll give you a better reason, though: Given the current climate, even starting today from scratch, by the time we could get even one refinery built, we will probably no longer be dependent on oil and its derivatives for most of our power.